Discussion
Over 2,000 accounts now being tracked on the Russian Botnet infecting the fediverse.
35% of them would be silenced or suspended by the IFTAS AUD list.
More info: https://about.iftas.org/library/suspected-portal-kombat-accounts/
@iftas I'm a moderator of the Italian instance mastodon.uno through @informapirata, and I noticed that one of the Russian bot accounts listed is attributed to the mastodon.uno instance.
The account in question was registered on January 12th and began to be active after more than a week. I personally reported it on January 21st and, as administrator @filippodb can confirm, I deactivated it using mastodon's freeze function.
At the same time, all posts published by that account were deleted, but obviously the messages (three in total) reshared by other accounts, messages that contained no problematic content, were not deleted.
The decision to deactivate it rather than suspend it was based on the fact that we were studying the Russian bot phenomenon to understand how often they attacked the deactivated profile, whether they connected automatically or manually, and whether the freeze function helped reduce subscriptions. And indeed, it did.
I would like to add that I personally continue to use this method to combat Russian bot registrations, even on the poliversity.it instance, which I personally manage. Following your report, I have added a silencing action to the freezing process, so that those accounts are not detected by your scraping system.
On mastodon.uno, however, for purely organizational reasons, we began directly suspending all accounts that still manage to bypass the blocks we've placed on the email addresses used to register.
Returning to the main point, I would like to point out that your report only reached us on April 30th, a full 90 days later, and that account had been rendered practically unusable. Your identification of the account was carried out through automated processing (scraping) and resulted in a now useless report because it was not linked to any content and to an account that was no longer usable. A report that was therefore completely rightfully not given priority.
The account was then permanently suspended on May 3rd, three days after your report.
Mastodon.uno is the largest Italian instance, with thousands of active users and dozens of registrations per day. Thanks to a staff of around twenty volunteer moderators, we can keep registrations open with virtually immediate processing times and extremely rapid decision-making.
We therefore ask you to remove the name of the bot that was no longer present in our instance from the list of Russian bots, which had been removed from our instance well before your report.
We believe it is not only unfair but also extremely damaging to our reputation that our instance, one of the most active in combating Russian botnets, should be lumped together with other instances that do not practice moderation at all, or that practice poor or incomplete moderation.
We look forward to hearing from you and thank you for your attention.
@informapirata@poliverso.org @filippodb @iftas Finally, I'd like to add one of the many posts we've published in recent months (this one from mid-March), in which we inform our users about the specifics of Russian disinformation and the attacks we receive from their botnets. Just to show how sensitive we are to the problem.
@iftas @anewsocial doesn't seem to belong on this list
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